Key Points
EW previews Sydney Sweeney’s new film, Americana, including a handful of exclusive images.
The film also stars Paul Walter Hauser and Halsey.
The three stars tease their roles and what fans can expect from the project.
Dolly Parton is as American as apple pie.
So it’s fitting that a movie titled Americana stars Sydney Sweeney as a diner waitress, Penny Jo Poplin, who idolizes the country superstar. “Dolly is definitely her biggest aspirational role model,” Sweeney tells Entertainment Weekly. “Dolly is almost like a godlike figure to Penny Jo, and I really wanted to make sure that we had the aspirations of being Dolly, but then, she doesn’t have the resources.”
“It’s trying to find that in-between place of who Penny is and what she has,” Sweeney continues. “But then also who she wants to be. Penny Jo dreams of being able to have Dolly’s outlook on life because her world feels so gray, dark, and trapped. [Dolly has] this beautiful big personality and energy that makes everything have color again, and that’s what she wants.”
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Paul Walter Hauser and Sydney Sweeney in ‘Americana’
She also wants to be a singer-songwriter (Sweeney even learned to pluck out a few chords on guitar for the film) — and the answer to her dreams might have arrived in the artifact at the heart of the film.
“She finally sees something that can be her ticket to Nashville,” Sweeney teases. “It’s her ticket to be able to go and chase her dreams. And she’s past the point of waiting for it to happen.
America the beautiful…
Written and directed by Tony Tost (Longmire), the movie (in theaters on Aug. 22) traces the hubbub around a Lakota ghost shirt falling onto the black market in Penny Jo’s small South Dakotan town. The artifact draws together the town’s outcasts and outsiders — also including local ranch-hand Lefty Ledbetter (Paul Walter Hauser) and rebel Mandy Starr (Halsey) — into violent intrigue
“The bounty in this film is not your typical bounty when you think of it in movies,” says Hauser. “You think of a treasure chest or a briefcase full of money. In this case, our bounty is this ancient Native American artifact, and you’ll see all these different characters trying to obtain it.”
Hauser also stresses that the film is really an ensemble piece. “Everybody gets a base hit,” he says. “Everybody delivers in such a terrific, perfect way. Even small characters feel like they’re fully lived-in.”
Bad reputation
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Halsey in ‘Americana’
Halsey can summarize her character in one word: “Badass.”
“She’s holding on to a pretty profound secret that is eating her alive a little bit,” the singer/actress says of her character. “She’s really struggling with wanting to do the right thing and be a good person. It’s been challenging for her because she’s been done wrong by so many people that she’s trusted.”
A bit of a wild child, Mandy has a “very small found family” that Halsey describes as different from the one she was born to. “A lot of people will resonate with growing up under circumstances out of their control,” she says, “and wanting to do better and break these generational curses.”
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Mandy also finds inspiration in music icons — for her, as evidenced by her hairstyle, it’s Joan Jett. “She aspires to be these badass women who don’t really take s— from anyone around them,” she explains. “Women who carved out their own path and have a voice and something to say. Mandy’s still finding her way to becoming those women that she admires.”
As for Mandy’s connection to the artifact, all Halsey will say is, “Mandy has a great ability to be in the wrong place at the wrong time — or at the right time, depending on how you look at it.”
Lonesome for loving you
Perhaps the greatest misfit in this band of outsiders is Lefty Ledbetter, a man who has isolated himself within his work on a ranch. “My character is kind of a hermit,” says Hauser. “He’s a social isolationist, and that horse is one of his only friends.”
Working with horses was a new experience for Hauser, and he particularly loved working with Oreo, who is featured here in an exclusive image alongside the Emmy winner.
“Oreo was a little spooked and I was just being very trepidatious, trying not to scare the horse,” he recalls. “That was my first time working with animals outside of working with some dogs on Cruella. The pony is more majestic. The dogs were a little unwieldy.”
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Paul Walter Hauser in ‘Americana’
Perhaps of all the characters, Lefty is the one most looking for something outside of himself. “The theme of that character is the idea of wanting to not only be loved, but to love,” Hauser reflects.
And while Lefty might be an isolationist, Hauser says he’s also a hopeless romantic and goes on different dating sites trying to date different women.
“That was a fun character to play because I have some of that in me,” Hauser admits. “I remember the days before I was married of not just wanting to be loved, but to also love somebody and knowing you have that capacity in you. There’s a pretty deep well of emotion behind that character.”
Much of that energy ends up going toward Penny Jo, who Lefty teams up with to pursue the Lakota ghost shirt. “These two characters end up befriending each other,” he explains. “They’re both outcasts in different ways, and they end up trying to make their dreams come through together.”
In the process, Lefty, of course, “falls for her and she becomes his dream.”
There’s a lot of talk about dreams here, which brings to mind the film’s title, Americana, and all that word evokes — be it red, white, and blue or Norman Rockwell paintings.
“Americana has a bit of a double entendre for the film,” Hauser muses. “It’s something classic in Americana, and then, something also tongue-in-cheek talking about the American dream and the American state of morality.”
While viewers will have their own interpretations after seeing the movie, he thinks it will be universally understood as “equal parts beautiful and heartbreaking.”
“You feel that connotation,” he concludes, “just from the word Americana.”
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